Little Women's Meg shows that it's perfectly feminist to want to be a housewife

Follow the author of this article

Follow the topics within this article

Jo must marry Laurie. So hundreds of girl fans wrote to Louisa May Alcott after the success of the first volume of Little Women. Alcott, sieged by letters demanding to know “who the little women marry, as if that was the only end and aim of a woman’s life”, began to plot, “out of perversity”, a different sort of love and life and fate for Jo.

The reason Little Women endures, the reason we still read the book, curl up with Marmee, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy on the page or on the screen, is because Alcott’s March sisters are more than wallflowers waiting for husbands. They are real, distinct, headstrong, mulishly stubborn, cattishly cruel (Amy’s burning of Jo’s unfinished novel is one of the great sisterly...